So here's the film batting to be this year's The Social Network. It's got the whole package: a plot that revolves round a revolutionary bit of computer kit, loads of scenes in which men argue in boardrooms, and a script spritzed with zingers by Aaron Sorkin. But the software in Moneyball – sabermetrics, or the use of data analysis to place a fiscal value on baseball attributes – is a tougher sell than the insta-sexy Facebook, and its potential impact on the world feels a lot less tectonic. Those who enter the cinema unstirred by either the sport or by the joys of stats are unlikely to come out converts.

Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, a star player gone to seed and now managing an ailing team in Oakland. He doesn't have cash to blow on pricey players so needs to get creative. Enter an economics whiz (Jonah Hill), who briefs him on the hidden bargains to be snapped up for a song – think Bargain Hunt meets Wisden. Such unorthodox tactics incur the anger of Billy's traditionalist colleagues, most notably Philip Seymour Hoffman's head coach – a performance of mostly unleavened grumpiness, this, just as Robin Wright (as Billy's estranged wife) is simply supportive, and Kerris Dorsey as his 12-year-old daughter purely precocious.

Pitt, meanwhile, comes across as a bit of a knackered lunk, too vanilla for his struggles to grip in the same way as, say, those of Michael Sheen's Brian Clough in The Damned United – a film with a similar real-life sporting triumph template.

The exception is Hill, who delivers a surprisingly affecting performance, shy but not simpering, with a refreshing lack of character arc. It's the sort of turn too rare on screen: unshowy and naturalistic.

Overall though, Moneyball is more melodramatic than one might expect from the pen of Sorkin (who massaged an earlier draft by Steven Zaillian), gooier in the middle and coshing the audience with emotional wallops. While The Social Network scaled up the computer programme at its centre to say wider things about humanity (that electronic connectivity may not ultimately alleviate loneliness), Moneyball fails to deliver any thesis on whether or not people can be condensed to data. It's a topic you'd imagine might have tickled the scriptwriter - but compared to Sorkin's earlier efforts, this has all the subtle touch of a baseball mitt.